Visible Language 29:2. Visible Language, Comparative Literature University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa Herman Rapaport,

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Comparative Literature University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1408

Visible Language 29:2 Herman Rapaport, 160-179

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Providence, Rhode Island 02903

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David Garcia: An Interview

Herman Rapaport

In this interview, David Garcia offers his definition of video art, separating it from other related media such as television. Video art is more about light and time than it is about narrative. He discusses the role of appropriation and the collage element in video in terms of unpacking history. A loose definition of what constitutes a successful video piece is another thread of dialogue running throughout the interview.

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162 Visible Language 29:2

Herman Rapaport David, you are

David Garcia Time Based Arts was something which began

vey closely connected with an

when Annie Wright and I had gotten together the early 1980s. organzation called Time Based Arts

We were at art school in the south of Holland at Maastricht at in the Netherlands. When did you

the Jan Van Eyck Academy and at that time the most influential become involved with it and what

non-museum art organization in Holland was a kind of gallery was its evolution?

called The Apple. It was one of the most important places for performance art. Many performance artists, both European and American showed there, for example, Laurie Anderson, but even people like David Salle who, in fact, did some important early drawings there.

But at a certain point The Apple began to change direction. It began to lose interest in video even though it had an archive of video work which included significant performances by Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Ulay and others. The Apple wanted a place to house the video work; it wanted a sort of gallery able to sustain the video enterprise even though it was moving in a different direction, and so they conceived of a video space that was run or at least set up by artists. The two people responsible for this were Wies Smals and Gerharel von Graevenitz, two remarkable people who were among the best curators in Holland. Because they were both killed in a plane crash, the whole video art scene in Holland changed radically after they died. However, one of the last projects they did was to set up Time Based Arts. They invited video artists to form a

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Rapaport & Garcia 163

founding membership group, and Annie Wright and I were asked to join. Ulysses Carrion, Raul Marroquin, Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas are others who come to mind. We wanted Time Based Arts to be a business enterprise, distributing and forwarding video art, as well as a software laboratory, a place where one could try new ideas out with the medium. Because we did not want to restrict the organization to video, we called it Time Based Arts, an organization covering all the time based media: performance, sound work, film, video, though within the tradition of the visual arts. It has become an important place in the development of video in Holland.

Does Time Based Arts have contact

Yes and particularly with the Staedlik Museum. In fact, Dorine with other museums in Holland on a

Mignot is the Dutch museum curator with perhaps the most regular basis?

interest in video; she is on our board. In Holland, the Staedlik is really the one museum which is seriously committed to video art.

Perhaps one of the most frequently

Definitions are problematic. As soon as you define one set of asked questions here in the United

terms, you have to define others. At a certain point I think States about video concerns its

visual artists discovered that video was a tool that could be used definition, and I'd like to spend some

in as many different ways as there are visual artists. I don't think time considering that. What, in your

there is anything so characteristic about video art that it could view, characterizes video art? Does it

not be contradicted in practice. What distinguishes it from differ from other media like

television or other media is tradition. You've got a tradition of television, radio, etc.?

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the visual arts that permitted video to exist under its umbrella. Video art is defined by its context within the visual arts and the concerns which make up the artistic tradition. What differentiates it from television is that television is one tradition and the visual arts are part of another.

Therefore video art takes place in

The only word I can use to describe this is discourse: video is a terms of conventions

discourse. Our world is made up of numerous discourses which and practices inherently alien to, say,

do not have anything but semi-autonomy, though each has its broadcast television?

separate rules and regulations. Therefore you have television discourse and you have a visual arts discourse. At a certain point it was possible for video to live within the visual arts discourse and has become defined in relation to that. That's the only way of describing it that makes any sense to me.

But video art can bring its discourse

. . . . . Sure, various people bring them into conjunction; others reject znto relatwn wzth televzszon

that, as in the case of Bill Viola or Nan Hoover. Or Elsa discourse. They're not separate worlds

Stansfield. They reject television with a vengance and want nothing to do with it. While Nam June Paik or General Idea see their work in relation to television simply because it's the same box or technology. But we could think of it as the same type of difference you have between journalism and poetry. All writers use the pencil and paper, but their frames of reference are so different. The discourses are so separate.

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But how are the discourses

I don't think you really have such a blurring. One of the incidental diffirent? For example, doesn't

features of art is that one will have a spin off of something into the something Like Music Television

general culture. It's like the American space program: engineers are (rock videos) blur some of the

always discovering things which can be applied elsewhere. Teflon distinctions between broadcast

would be a case in point. Similarly, people weren't using primary television and the arts?

colors generally in the commercial world until Matisse and the fauves encouraged such thinking. Art is an R & D branch of culture in a curious sort of way. And so I don't place much significance on the fact that MTV appropriates elements from the fine arts. Yet, it's there. Yet it reflects a function which artists have and that's it. MTV is artistic; it's not art.

The history of art has generated its own issues and problems. And

this goes back to questions of what art is, the narrative about what it means to be a visual artist in Western liberal democracy. One inherits a whole narrative about what this means and different generations of artists emphasize various aspects of this narrative differently. People are often put off by video art because when they see it on the monitor they bring to it a different set of ex-pectations unrelated to the visual arts. They see video art merely as broadcast television. But I recognize something as being artist's

video simply because it addresses the issue of art rather than any other set of issues.

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You might say that video art is described largely in terms of itsintentions. Artist's video has intentions related to a field which is entirely different from that of rock video. The constrictions are different and are inescapable. You can't make a set of images in rock video which deviate seriously from the music. The image is there to perform a function; it's really an advertisement for the record. So it's applied art in that sense. Of course, I'm not dismissing it, but it is a very separate thing because it's there to do a certain job whose intentions are different from those of the video artist. One might think about designing telephones. When one designs a telephone, one is not doing that to design great sculpture.

In the 1960s there was a lot of

The signature was very much an ideological problem which concern about not making works that

extended beyond the visual arts. It was inherited from the 1960s had signatures, which is to say, works

in which people wanted to play down individualism. The issue whose styles were inimitable and

does not play a major part in art of the moment. Powerful identified with particular figures.

individual voices are something which are around now. But as I How do video artists deal with this

say that I can think of artists questioning authorship, though if issue?

you take the signature to represent authorship and identity you will see people are questioning it differently. Plagiarizing or simulating works would be an example of such questioning.

What attracts people to painting is the physical presence of the artist. What people want is aura. Video, since it is mechanically reproducible, gets one away from the fetish value of the work,

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the physical presence of the artist. So video cannot help but engage the question of what you call the signature.

The video artist is aLso working at a

The history of art seems to split when we talk about the remove in that (s)he manipulates

practice of collage. One group has a relationship to materials found materials, often, like a collage

which is intimate, and another group is interested in the artist.

manipulation of information rather than materials. Those latter artists by definition place less emphasis on things like handwrit-ing and valuhandwrit-ing work from that point of view. Its value is not the physical presence of the artist.

But the history of art focuses

Yes. The artist is interpreting the world and the story of traditionally on the transformation of

art through whatever medium (s)he chooses, and if the information into material, a

artist has an authoritative personality, then (s)he can transformation stressing the expression

persuade others and the interpretation has some of the artist. Isn't that so? I'm

validity. And then you've got a successful work of art. wondering about expression in the

sense that a video work may well express thee onsciousness of the artist. Given that video is a time based art, video allows for an unfolding of temporality in terms of the progress of thinking. So there is, in fact, a subject who enters into an intimate relation to video. One can intuit or imagine a person who mediates what we see, some consciousness with whom we can identifY.

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To get back to collage, though,

how is

Electronic ways of manipulating the image bring it close

video art related to it as a practice?

to the malleability of those who work with found images. The availability of ordinary home video equipment means, for example, that television images are as available as magazine images. One can just cut them out. Just because images have become accessible in this way it means that people are probably going to try collaging them.

If

we think of the information/

Well, I had an interesting conversation with Dara Birnbaum

material distinction, don't we find

about appropriation. She told me that she met a student in

that because video images can be put

America who had used her tape in a piece. And Birnbaum said,

into new relationships that layers of

"I had found her and she had my Wonder Woman." And I said,

meaning can be brought out of the

"But Dara what do you mean by your Wonder Woman; she who

material once it has become

lives by the sword of appropriation should be prepared to die

rearranged, that video can give back to

by it."

the image an immediacy and intimacy which broadcast television suppressed? Also, there's ideological repositioning, for example, Dara Birnbaum's

Wonder Woman video tape Of course, I can't speak for her. But what I get from it is parody by repetition. It's about dissociation by. repetition. Klaus von Bruch does this too. These people make mind numbing sense of a visual experience. They change its nature by repetition.

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How do you conceptualize your ow17

Annie Wright and I have a very different set of ideas about work?

what our work is about. And this difference makes the works function. It's like positive and negative electricity. So a kind of energy results. Anything I say might be contradicted by Annie which is important to remember in this interview. But my initial interest in video was related to my obsession with light. As a painter I was interested in artists who made canvas give off light as opposed to simply reflecting light. It's like considering landscape at twilight as opposed to midday. At twilight and dawn the objects give off light. Light does not simply land on

them. Turner and Casper David Friedrich were interested in

using color to embody and not merely represent light. Also, stained glass interests me. There, powerful Biblical narratives are told through the medium of a light emitting source, something like video. The thrill of video for me is that it is a light emitting source, and I found from the beginning that I could do in video what had always frustrated me in painting. I'm not saying one can't do it in painting, but the initial thrill of video was its light emitting capacity and the fact that you can use the camera like a paintbrush. You see the effects immedi-ately. You can use the camera in a gestural way. You can

manipulate the screen light paper and communicate light in a

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I have been struck by how both film

It's a kind of popular mysticism. I think it's like the vision of the and video have begun using light in a

mystics, the landscapes are always jewelled, aren't they? Aldous very apocalyptic way. Everything is

Huxley wrote of this in

Doors ofPerceptionin

which he speaks of bathed in a very white and harsh light

light as essential to mystical vision. The landscapes of the which is often coming directly at the

mystics have to give off light, like stained glass windows or as in vzewer.

the illuminated manuscripts.

We're supposed to flow into the light .

And the darkness as well.

Well, generally, how do you see light

In Rothko light smolders. I think that in all art facts become art functioning in art? Mark Rothko, for

through love, crazy as that sounds, and for me the equivalent example?

way it saturates is light. I think in that sense love and libido ...

Light is an ecstatic experience, it is

I think Freud's correct: it's love, you know, erotic love and the ek-static ...

maybe just erotic love.

I'm wondering about light in relation

That's an interesting question. I have no answer for it. to time. What is that relation in art?

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Bill Viola produced a visual answer, a sense of light and time.

Maybe we'll come back to this. But

Maybe it's like painting, it's anything you want to do with a already we've come a long way towards

paintbrush, colors and canvas, isn't it? understanding that video art isn't, as

some people like to think, just anything.

Is it?

Well ... (laughs) what happens is that art has a way of mirroring and also leading culture. Today we have pluralism: numerous conversations which are mutually incompat-ible. And the triumph of the liberal democracies is that these mutually incompatible conversations co-exist in the same culture. So that's strange in that it hasn't happened very often in history. But it has happened in our history and I think that is a very fruitful thing. Now since we've got a self-critical culture which allows for these incompatible discourses, it is logical to think art would reflect that. So if we want to define video art, we have to realize that it is going to be made up of these many mutually incompatible strands, and that this will rule out the sort of definition you were asking about before. What it comes down to is this: I can describe what I care about, but I wouldn't pretend that this would describe the area as a whole. Such a description is not feasible. This is frustrating if one wants to write a book in which one searches for definitions.

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Okay. But quite ftankly I think based

You bring to bear all the kinds of equipment for assessing video on the sort of things we've been saying

that you would use with any art work. That is, how does the

about video art that it's less pluralistic

work clearly communicate its own intentions? That's than we might think. It has all those

number one. strands going on, but it has an expressive dimension, and I have the feeling that

if

I were to push you on the subject you would be able to make a distinction between a good and a bad video art piece. And what interests me is how an artist like yourself necessarily is going to make this kind of discrimination.

So the work has intentions?

Of course. When you see the work, if you're familiar with art and its language, you're immediately clear about what the artist is trying to do. Second, there is the question of whether the artist has succeeded in bringing that intention to fruition.

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So the video work has an aim or

Well, maybe not one, but a cluster ...

purpose. There's a conception, an

execution of a conception ...

Okay, fine .

. . . and this cluster of ideas or issues or obsessions are evident. So that when you look at that piece of work the cluster of issues is clear, and you say, well, this artist is clear about the meaning

that (s)he is dealing with.

Good. This is the kind of thing I

This work, yes. All works, no. The question is one of finding wanted to get to: that there are

ways in which to stretch the bubble of meaning within which meanings, a conception, an execution

I'm operating. If I remain in that bubble of meaning do I just

and that the work isn't just anything

pussyfoot around it or do I get inside it and try to stretch its at all.

parameters and add to the pool of meanings of what culture is. Like we said with Dara Birnbaum: she contributes to the pool of meanings and keeps it from becoming stagnant. Sometimes the artist has aims you could never even have thought possible,

and when the work gains momentum the artist is actually

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Actually this is not an unusual view

Richard Howard is translating

Proust

in New York City

and is of art, and I appreciate the fact that

contemplating another title besides

Remembrance

ofThings Past.

you don't shy away from it, because I

In

Search of

Lost

Time

seems to be the title he wants to supply in don't see how art could be otherwise.

English. The feeling that time is lost and that one wants to Having said that, let's get back to the

salvage that and come into relation with time in a diffferent question of light and time, since I

dimension is something I find most interesting, and I don't think would say that is very crucial for an

the analogy is pretentious when one raises the work of Bill understanding of video.

Viola. In his most recent work there is a powerful manipulation of time since he is able to slow down and speed up our sensation of time.

You're referring to "!Do Not Know

It's not narrative in any traditional sense, no. What It Is I Am Like. " There image

and light, not narrative, govern consczousness.

Right. And video really has the

And character identification. possibility of structuring our

consciousness ofperception in terms of working with duration, light and

image without becoming bogged down in story.

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And you have no sense of beginning,

Yes, it succeeds in dissolving that. Also, there's a point in the middle and end determining the

middle of the tape where after having been taken tortuously whole.

and slowly from the beginning, the tape builds up momentum and accelerates to the highest point which is a strobe light going from black to white at strobe speed. Now there really is an example of an intimate relationship between light and time, almost an astronomical concept in a way.

What works would you consider

One of the most powerful pieces was made by Klaus von Bruch. among the stronger video art pieces

It's called

D

as

Propellorb

and,

1

979

He takes a piece of film

that you have seen in your career?

which shows the propellers of the Enola Gay being wound. You don't know it's the Enola Gay when you watch the tape-that's incidental information. Anyway, he just shows the people who are winding the propellers and just repeats that at different speeds and cuts in at different times. Occasionally you see his face, but again time is stretched. Considering what a limited set of images is being used, the tape turns out to be actually quite long. But you're drawn into a kind of mesmeric relationship to the images, where the colors even seem to

change because the cuts are so fast that they seem to mix together and the motion of the blades and the movements of the men and the speed of the editing bring you into a trance-like state with a fragment of history or recorded history. It's just

an incredibly powerful piece, like a work by Steve Reich, but with the added dimension of an image.

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Of course. And one of the things that

It makes you more critical and produces a door for you to go video does is to reconstitute events. It

through. To some extent the tapes which use a lot of repetition reconstructs in such a radical way

are like stuck records. I don't know if you're familiar with the that one has a hard time separating

Scratch Video group in England, people like George Barber. this from the process of decomposition

They set out to parallel what Haarlem DJs were doing with

or decontextualization. We usually

scratch records and would take material from television and use take visual images like the winding

repetition for political ends. The notion of an event would be up of propellers on the Enola Gay as

exploded. In fact, the fantasy nature of the event is prohibited real and overlook them, almost, on

by repetition, too. That's important in relation to Birnbaum's account of that. It's just mundane. Yet

Wonder Woman. In Viola's or Hoover's work the landscape based these events are embedded in the

pieces are prepared to move at times at a pace that feels almost narratives such as those we would

geological, that feels almost more like Proust: the feeling of encounter on a newsreel about the

entering into the experience by stepping out of time. plane that dropped the first atom

bomb on japan. So von Bruch is

unpacking something embedded in that history. And in this way he stretches that event's time. Maybe in doing so he even stalls the event, resists its destiny.

As

if

time and the event were being

Particularly his most recent work. After I saw Hans Breder's

stretched. By the way, this happens in

tape, I mentioned Klaus von Bruch to him, since the revolving Hans Breder's video work too.

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is to say, a satellite dish which receives information. Bruch uses a mixing of images, for example, the contracting and swelling of his chest in relation to the turning of the dish. The experience unfolds once again as repetition, as a feeling of cycle, and I felt that in Breder's piece too, since each repetition allows the moment to unfold further. This doesn't happen in the Birnbaum tape, since she is intentionally doing something else. She uses the stuck record approach in order to make a political statement whereas Bruch or Breder are more reflective, closer to minimal music in Reich.

Lastly, let's talk about collaboration.

Well, I've done a lot of it. All throughout the history of art

You've done work with Annie Wright

collaborations have existed. Rubens had a factory, for example.

and with others, and the issue of

But especially in mechanically reproducible media collaboration,

collaboration has been important all

it becomes a bit more of a possiblity when the prime value of

during the 1980s and, one can only

the work no longer hinges on the distinctive mark which is the

suppose, will continue to be so.

physical fingerprint of an individual. When there are other values coming into prominence, then the door to collaboration is very much opened.

How do you and Annie Wright work

It's like working with any group, and remember I've worked

together when you're making a video?

with others too. It's one person who will have a kind of intention or general idea which makes sense to everyone. The idea might be a fundamental way of describing a narrative. For

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example, you might imagine the most primitive form of a narrative, such as a walk or journey. Then you simply follow the consequences of that framework behind the camera. So that would be a way of describing the way we work together: we set up a framework for an idea and follow the consequences of that framework. Within this situation all kinds of discussions and arguments about how it should be done take place. But I think there is a sort of basic rule that allows us to collaborate without which collaboration would not be possible. For al-though we might disagree vehemently when we're discussing the idea, as soon as it is on the screen we always know whether it works or not and we always agree about that aspect of our work. It's not a forced agreement. That's an important part of collaboration: there has to be enough meeting of the minds so that at a certain point everything will naturally come together. Not through compromise, not through having to agree, but enough of a mental relationship to be able to know when something works or not when it's viewed on screen.

One last question which takes us to

There are those two requirements we talked about earlier. Is some earlier points: what do you

there a clear set of intentions? And are those intentions

mean when you say that something

successfully realized? For me that implies that there is

doesn't work on screen? What isn't

not only a question of whether the piece makes sense

working when a video doesn't pass the

on screen, but whether it hits you below the belt. So

test of viewing?